xP provides an intuitive, high
quality, graphical (X11) user interface to the University of Washington's
PINE® Messaging System. xP aims to provide an interface that
is welcoming and easy to use for the new user, while still retaining the
look, feel and key commands of PINE for the experienced user.

( History )

This is a project a long time coming.
It started with me trying to develop an X11 mailer called X-Dora (named
for a former favorite e-mail client of mine). ;-) In any
case,
I got to using PINE, and it became my new favorite; although I missed the
graphical interface. So I broke out the old X-dora project and started
making it "PINE-like." Mind you, I haven't done great work in it
lately -- damn college classes. But I digress..

My goal is to make the program
resemble PINE as closely as possible while making it intuitive and friendly
for the new user. This project IS NOT an attempt to replace PINE.
Rather it will consist of a series of patches to append to the PINE distribution.
This way, if you're at a graphical (X11) console, you can run xP, if
you're at a text-only console, you can run PINE. And the beauty is
-- they're the SAME program! Two programs in one mean that your mailboxes
are always the same, your signatures are always the same, there is consistency
in life! Well kinda.. ;-)

( Screenshots )

I've recently picked up work on xP again. I've ported it to the new
XClass toolkit (v0.5.3), and I'm working on integrating it with the new
PINE source (v4.33). I still have a ways to go. Here are some
screen shots.

It was the best of licenses, it
was the worst of licenses.. :) Just kidding.. But we
are treading dangerous waters here, so be careful..

The House of WashingtonThe University of Washington owns
PINE and is responsible for distributing and maintaining PINE. They
crafted a license for PINE which, in effect, states that developers are
free to distribute their source changes to PINE as "diff" files which users
can use to run the program "patch", to update their PINE distribution with
the changes. This of course implies that any attempt to distribute
a modified source code to PINE is completely prohibited.

The House of StallmanFor the development of xP,
I selected the XClass95 library by Hector Peraza. Mr. Peraza was
good enough to license his software under the GNU Library General Public
License. This is very good because it gives the XClass95 library
enough flexibility so that I can modify it to suit my needs for xP,
and it also allows other program to make calls to some of its functions
without having to be licensed as GPL.

SolutionThe xP project consists of
several components:

The xP components are source files
that I independently developed. They have been carefully kept separate
from any PINE files so as to insure that they don't get absorbed by the
PINE license. These files are all licensed LGPL.

Secondly, there are new files to PINE
which reside with the PINE source. These just made it easier for
me to keep most of my changes away from the PINE core source files.
These files are also LGPL.

Finally, there are a few "diff" files
which are used to modify the PINE distribution so that it will call xP
when necessary. Eventually, you need to get your hands dirty with
PINE so xP can run -- otherwise xP is just dead code that expands
the PINE binary size by 200k. These "diff" files consist of my "changes
to the PINE distribution." These have to correspond to the PINE license.

I believe this is the best of all
possible licensing solutions for coding xP.

( Documentation )

Please be sure to check
the Sourceforge-xP
web page for additional information and links to other parts of
the xP project.

Also, be sure to read the FAQ
for answers to all your favorite
questions! :)

I have created a page which will contain xP design
policies. Right now there are only two, but have no fear, I will
write
more when I grow tired of coding once again.. :)

And OF COURSE don't forget to check the University of
Washington's Pine Information
Center for news, reference, and information from THE Pine source.

( Downloads )

Please remember, this is a
DEVELOPER'S VERSION of xP. It is not currently usable as an e-mail
client. A stable version will be coming soon, but is NOT available
yet. There is a GOOD chance this program will crash while you're
running it.

I would HIGHLY RECOMMEND
using the INSTALLER and not using the install directions.

The installer is complete.
It has been statically built and compressed using gzexe. It
is only
a binary. You SHOULD NOT decompress this file. Simply download
it and run it. You DO NOT need to run it with root permissions,
just make sure you have permissions to the directories you are trying to
edit (or the parent directory if you are trying to create a
directory).

Unfortunately, http doesn't download the permissions information along
with the file. So after downloading you must either run the binary
through a shell (i.e. sh xp-installer*) or you must set
the executable permission (i.e. chmod a+x xp-installer*)
and then run the binary.